POLICE: As if your life didn't suck enough, suicide is illegal, so now you have to go to jail.

Logic at work.

That's because of our views about suicide. It reminds me of some show about religion I once saw on the History Channel. A Rabbi was explaining his religion's policy on suicides, and it went something like this: A person who commits suicide can not be given full religious rites upon their death, but a special exemption is made for mentally-ill people, and all people who commit suicide are considered to be mentally ill. It was a cute little end-around their own beliefs, but I digress.

It's not that the US wants to throw suicidal people in jail, it's that if it's not illegal they have absolutely no way to have a judge force a suicidal person into counseling or psychiatric observation/care. The belief in the US is that something has to be wrong with you if you want to kill yourself, and they want to treat that. Whether or not that is a proper view is open for debate.

Suicide pacts encourage people to commit suicide, while in normal conditions the person could decide not to do it at the last minute. But in a group, this could result in peer pressure conditions. Encouraging someone to commit suicide is equivalent to killing him.

Murder? That's ridiculous. "Encouraging someone to do X" is NOT the same as "inflicting consequences of doing X on someone." These people have functional neural clusters. If they didn't want to die, it doesn't matter how much "encouragement" they get, they're not going ot off themselves.By that logic, I gave my girlfriend her MA by encouraging her to go to grad school. Give me a break.

In the end, they, and only they, are responsible for thier actions. That "peer pressure" copout didn't work when it was extr

At the same time, strong social pressures can overwhelm those "functional neural clusters" in certain situations. There's quite a bit of psychological evidence for this (see the Milgram experiments, Isen and Levin's phone booth experiment, Latane and Darley, Darley and Batson, the Zimbardo Prison experiment). It's fairly plausible that if you get four people together in a group suicide pact, where 3 are bent on killing themselves and one has second thoughts, that other one will probably still go through w

You're assuming that those who choose to commit suicide, for any reason, isn't worthy of living (or the world is better off without them). While I can see how someone can see it that way, I would have to disagree.

It is very possible that these people can be very creative or smart and are in a temporary rut. Or it is also possible that they have somekind of illness like bipolar or manic depression, which is treatable.

Plus, I bet that almost all of them have friends or family that would be very upset with this.

People become depressed or financially or emotionally desperate all over the world. What kind of action (if any) it translates into depends a lot on social factors, such as the general acceptance of a given act, the impact on friends and relatives, the number of friends and relatives you have to be impacted and so on.

So in a culture where a suicide doesn't carry a heavy stigma, where you tend to have small circles of family and friends and where some peculiarities of financial law can make it an attractive option in some corner cases you'll get quite a few suicides.

Note that another way of "dealing" with an intolerable life situation, the killing spree or "going postal" kind of shootout, drunken rampages with a vehicle and so on, is very rare to unheard of here.

I don't just mean those killing themselves via internet, I mean the notoriously high general suicide rates of Japan. They are quite real,

No, they are not, and you're perpetuating the same stereotype as the article submitter. See here [who.int] for actual suicide rates around the world. Japan's are higher than the US but lower than many other countries (Russia's suicide rate, for example, is about double that of Japan's) - overall, Japan is about average. Finland's suicide rate is comparable to Japan's, but you wouldn't know it based on media coverage - I don't recall seeing any news stories on Slashdot about those crazy, depressed Finns.

Yes, they are. Using your own source, the suicide rate in Japan is the 11th-highest of the 100 countries listed. As a point of comparison, the US is 44th. Again, from your own source, the average suicide rate between males and females in the US is 10.85 per 100,000, while the average in Japan is 25.3 per 100,000 (roughly 2.5x the US rate).

So, yes, Japan has a notoriously high general suicide rate. You disagreed with GP by pointing out that Kazakhstan and a handfull of other countries

Whatever it is about Japan that produces suicidal people at higher rates, I know of three types of suicidal people in Japan:* Samuri doing it to regain honour/because they've lost too much honour.* Kamakazi pilots doing it most likely for patriotism.* Suicid clubs

I wouldn't count you're average every day suicide because they happen all over the world. But as far as I know, nowhere but in Japan do the above 3 types of suicidal people get created to the degree in which they're created in Japan.

But as far as I know, nowhere but in Japan do the above 3 types of suicidal people get created to the degree in which they're created in Japan.

WHen you consider that you by definition need to be Japanese for the first two (and have to have lived before the Meji restoration era and during the second world war, respectively), that's not exactly a profound statement.

They have so little land. They're all packed in there tightly. Scientists have done experiments with rats where they give them enough space and resources for 50 of them, start them with 10, let them breed, and then let nature take its course. What happens is that eventually they start fighting over resources (predictable) but also get mental illnesses at a much higher rate. They also started engaging in self-destructive acts. I think we see the same thing with Japanese people now. What, 130 million pe

Uh, that's the most bogus attempt to apply the results of animal studies to humans I've ever seen. According to this [wikipedia.org] Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher population density than Japan --- where are all the Belgian suicides? Also, your theory implies that urban areas would have a higher rate of suicide per capita, which AFAIK has not been observed.

Westerners often speculate that there must be some deep unhappiness in Japanese society to cause all these suicides, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. Suicide is much more prominent in Japanese mass culture than it is in the rest of the world, and there's less stigma attached to it. For centuries there have been honor suicides, love suicides and so on (common, and often viewed as positive acts). Popular Japanese authors regularly kill themselves (even more so than here). Also, Japan's main

For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.

Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", about a love-stricken young poet that kills himself in despair caused a similar wave of suicides among European youths when it was first published.

Similarily, this "wave" of internet suicides (which is nothing new; it's been reported here for

Yo, we're normal high school kids. Get over the stereotype. We may look funny or listen to weird music, but hey, wasn't that the goths a few years back when everyone poked fun at them? We're as human as you. Don't let a few rotten apples ruin the whole bunch.

That was my very point. Emo kids don't commit suicide, but hikikomori do.

Of course, a lot of (supposedly somewhat) knowledgable Slashdotters here say that Japanese culture has always found suicide far more acceptable than Western (ie: European-derived) culture. Apparently they've just got a higher proportion of the same number of depressed people who kill themselves.

I'm told that while murder and suicide rates vary widely across cultures, the sum of the murder and suicide rate is remarkably constant at around 22 deaths per 100K population per year. Presumably it suggests that we all resort to ultimate measures with about the same probability, but cultural differences determine who takes the bullet.

"I have to wonder, what is it about Japanese culture that produces these people in such high numbers?"

When you says these people I am going to assume you means suicides in general, and not just suicide clubs. First of all I want to say that 26 people in 2 months having died in suicide clubs, is likely FAR below the number that actually happened with clubs, and is definitely far below the number of actual suicides.

I take the train in Tokyo to work everyday often, probably once per week, a train that I am riding on is delyed due to a "jishin jikko" which basically means self death incidient. Suicide is common in Japan. As to what cultural aspects influence this, not being a cultural expert, I can only guess at several.

1) Historically suicide was a way to maintain, or regain your honour. Honour and spirit are very important in Japanese culture. It is more important to the older generation than the younger generation, however, the younger generation cannot help but having these ideals ingrained into their subconscious.

2) Group thinking. The Japanese are extremely group oriented. The group is more important than the individual. Being ostracized by your group, and being in a position where you have let your group down can be extremely painful. It can be painful in any culture, but in Japan it is something more. There is an expression in Japan that says "The nail that sticks out must be hammered down!" This means that everyone should be alike and that anyone who is different should be forced to comply or exiled. For people who have never been in a group, or have been exiled from a group, the idea of joining a group again, where you are understood if even for a short time, could be a big motivator to join a suicide club.

3) Pride. Japanese people are very proud and adverse to failure. There have been cases where people have starved to death rather than go onto any kind of government assitance. There are very clear cultural rules regarding what is proper or improper behaviour and people would rather literally die than break some of those rules and be shamed in front of their friends and family.

4) Gaman suru! Gama suru essentially means to endure. In Japan, it is expected for people to endure hardships. To silently put up with tough situations and keep going. This is seen in many aspects of life here, whether it is pain, tough business situations, or the loss of a loved one. When the pressures get too high, it is hard to be able to talk to people and often suicide is seen as the easiest, most honourable out.

5) School system. The school system here is incredibly competitive. The study ethic here is higher than anywhere else I have seen in the world, and the pressure to perform is incredible. Students often finish school and then go to a private school for more intense training in the evenings. Getting into a good university here is the hardest part, and it can determine your life. Pressure and failures at school are huge stresses on the students, and it is often easier to kill yourself, than to admit failure.

If you look at the reasons above, and combine them together, it paints a better picture. There are probably reasons I have missed but I think the picture I have drawn is essentially correct. I have been in Japan for 6 years now, and am getting married to a Japanese woman in April. When we have children, I won't want them to go through a typical school in Japan.

How did I know somebody would turn this story into an opportunity for hate-America propoganda?

You do the math.

Very well. With a 2005 suicide rate of 91(!) per 100,000 (and the U.S's falling to just over 10, according the WHO), that means that the Japanese suicide rate alone is still over five times the U.S suicide and homicide rates combined. Surely that must be cause for some concern. (Whether one country is "better" than another is not relevant to this topic, just an irrelevant troll you brought up.)

Japan's suicide rate is not 91 per 100,000 people. The actual rate is closer to 25 per 100,000--a little less alarming, but still cause for concern.

According to TFA, 91 is the number of suicide pact-related deaths in Japan in 2005. That is, 91 out of the entire population of Japan (around 130 million) died via suicide pacts (which encompass only a portion of total suicides). The 2003 data quote in the article gives a more realistic rate of ~27 per 100,000 and the WHO lists the 2002 average rate at 24 p

ne of the most controversial aspects of World War II history, in relation to the present-day world, is the Rape of Nanking in 1937 when the Japanese army was moving through China and attacked the city of Nanking (sometimes spelled Nanjing).This all arose as a result of Japan's invasion of Manchuria and its eventual attack on China proper. This is where there are two terms involved as to when WWII actually started. For the U.S. , WWII started on December 7, 1941 with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The

Suicide does not have a significant effect on population. Not only that, most developed countries including Japan are having to deal with the prospect of a shrinking population. In fact, they call it their biggest problem [washingtonpost.com].

The solution to the world's problems is never allowing people to suffer.

Well, if you ask the people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in the US, you'll find that most of them realize that their problems are entirely solvable about half way down. Then they hit the water at 80 MPH and cost their families tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.

"It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life."

Is that they never get out - see the sun or get excercise. 30 minutes a day wards off all types of ailments, including depression (when was the last time a psychologist prescribed this?)

I heard in China that they have mandatory exercise (in some parts, like around 20 minutes a day) throughout the day, including outdoor community facilities which people are encourage to use. I wonder how Japan, especially Tokyo, is in this regard - especially office workers.

Actually, public support and encouragement for exercise here in Japan is quite common. It's a matter of culture. One of the first things I'm always asked during the "introductory conversation" (which varies little from person to person) is what kind of sports I like to do. Kids and adults are encouraged to exercise. Many communities have very well-appointed civic community centers with gyms and pools and martial arts classes (public funding for something like that isn't seen as something evil and social

> Is that they never get out - see the sun or get excercise. 30 minutes a day wards off all types of ailments, including depression (when was the last time a psychologist prescribed this?)

Why, oh why, must people take one or two people from their life and form an opinion based on anecdotal evidence on a planet with 6 billion folks. Trust me, excercise and sun does not cure a depressed person. Not leaving the house and not talking to people will help you become drepessed, but sun and fitness sure as hell

But at the same time it's not fair to lump all forms of depression into just being anti-social and lazy.

That's not what I'm said at all. I know from myself when I'm feeling depressed, it's usually because I've been cooped up too long. The last time was when I had a leg brace on and thus couldn't get exercise - I felt sicker because of the brace.

I also knew a colleague who became very rich and insisted on retiring around 50, from all his work, to live like a stereotypical senior citizen retiree - meaning s

I know from myself when I'm feeling depressed, it's usually because I've been cooped up too long...Attitude means a shitload... suicide is more common among people who live in dark/rainy areas and people who are less active... Of course, it's not all cases (let's not go Tom Cruise here), but a lot more than one thinks.

But you see, it doesn't necessarilly go both ways. Lack of activity can aggravate or cause depression, but that does not mean that depression can be cured by activity and sunshine. "More than one thinks?" I don't think so. The notion that one need only get some exercise and "cheer up" is age-old and quite pervasive. It's taken decades to get people to understand that dealing with clinical depression isn't simply a matter of putting on a happy face and taking a walk in the sun. Not to cast aspersions, but the problem is people like you, who've never had to deal with real depression. Just about everyone experiences depression at one time or another, but the vast majority of people only need a little activity, a little more sleep, a change in environment, etc. to fix it. Real clinical depression, the kind that is considered a problem is effectively defined by the fact that fighting it is not simply a matter of getting some exercise and sunshine. Yeah, sure, most people are cured by a walk on the beach, but none of them are the kind of people who're suicidal.

Having lived here awhile now, the idea of suicide in Japan is completely different from what it was in America. There are a couple things you have to keep in mind:

A) Mental illness is heavily stigmatizedB) Suicide is legal and only vaguely stigmatized

Oh, and if you kill yourself by jumping in front of a train (I don't know how many times I've sat on a train where we couldn't move until they cleaned it off), your family has to pay Japan Railways for the cost of repairs/cleaning. So, if you're crazy and hate your family and work 70 hours a week, suicide doesn't seem that bad, really. Nobody seems to care that much about it either. People always laugh and joke when the train comes to an abrupt stop.

Internet suicide is old news here. Just like your silly "cellular phones" and "computers". Telepathic communication is the new thing.

Having lived in Japan, and having family that's Japanese, I would have to dispute your second assertion. While it's true that suicide is more 'accepted' than in the west, it carries a somewhat heavy stigma in Japan.In Japanese history, many people commited suicide for one reason or another, but mostly it was to escape shame and dishonor after having been disgraced. A general who had lost an important battle for his lord, a woman who had been raped, or a samurai who had disgraced his master would be expected

Having been to Japan, I found a society that is near perfect...trains on time, organized streets, and very courteous folks. Everyone seemed to be busy with something. This masked what I guess I obviously failed to see.

Then I visited East Africa where I found a priviledged few among a sea of poverty and hopelessness. But what struck me is the ease the Africans took life as. They seemed to be happy, always thinking that the following day would be a better one. They even shared the little they had, something very rare in a major city in the USA for example.

This makes me wonder....What is it that we in the west miss out? Why is it that suicide rates in the so-called first world are significantly higher than those in the third world? Can we still call ourselves developed? I doubt.

I once read that in the Nazi death camps, suicide was very rare, but in the month after the camps were liberated a large number of survivors took their lives.

What I mean to say is that suicide is an act undertaken by those who are physically in good shape but psychologically and philosophically shattered. When you're starving, you think only of getting the next bite of food, and the thought of killing yourself is remote. When you have the time and mental capacity to ponder nihilism, that's when you take action. I think that would explain the third-world/first-world difference; there is not more misery in the first world, but the misery that exists is more conductive to suicide.

Anyone interested in the depressing aspects of liberation from a death camp should check out a book called King Rat by James Clavell. The work is semi-autobiographical as it features Changi, a POW camp run by the Japanese during WWII, where the author himself had been confined.

When the healthy, grinning troops from the Real World showed up, the prisoners were shattered when they realized just how totally screwed up they were, and how much they had lost in their grueling struggle for existance.

Err, veering somewhat on topic, some of the characters ended their lives in ways you'll remember. It's a fantastic book.

I understand that the best gauge of happiness is
relative standing with one's peers: basically,
you're happy if you can believe (without too much
strain) that you are doing a little better than
your neighbors. This scale is independent of
absolute wealth but it is sensitive to the range
of possibilities one's sees for one's life (or
the range of lives that one sees others apparently
not too different than oneself living).

So, the more visible models of others doing better,
the more miserable we tend to be

probably no one is tracking east african suicides, for one. East african mortality rate greater than one in ten, life expectency just over 30 years, plagues running rampant - does cause of death even get noticed or recorded there for the majority?

For your information, much of those Africans who live below the poverty line are happy. Life is surely hard but they are not sitting there crying out for a helping hand. They somehow carry on.

That is why most westerners fail to comprehend why such poor people can be happy at all. I know because I lived with them for almost a year. The problem I see with our westernized way of life, is that we are too individualistic and pretend a lot. Our society has been structured in asuch a way that "you are on your own

Do you know that the western world has the most cases of mental disorders? All these ADDs, ADHD, ASD, and all those disorders are in America. In Africa, despite all the poverty, mental disorders are unknown. The same is the case with the Chitimacha [Indian] tribe in the USA. This tribe has no known incidence in any mental health disease.

Also, I'm pretty sure there isn't much pressure to succeed in Poor Random East African Village. In America (and Japan), success is more readily available, and thus the pressure to achieve it is higher because you look incompetent if you don't succeed.

Hence, the reason why, if for no other good reason (charity), all Westerners should at least step foot once in a Third World country before even trying to argue that "life here sucks!"

I've read, on a few different occasions, the hypothesis that the high rate of suicide in Japan is due to the heavy work ethic there. Working hard is good, but from some things I've read [outpostnine.com], they just overexert themself, at least as I see it as a working American.

As I understand it, failling is frowned upon much harsher there, culturally, than it is here in America.

Also, did anyone think of the anime "Paranoia Agent" while reading this? It just made me think of one of the episodes half way through (6 or so) whe

Some of the culturally insensitive postings by slashdot readers is a bit disturbing. Having lived in Japan for several years, it is clear that Western morals regarding suicide do not necessarily apply in this complex and ancient culture.

In addition, readers need to do their homework before posting factual errors or made-up numbers regarding its prevalence. More than 40% of the suicides in Japan are motivated by health-related reasons (older people whose health is failing). These suicide pacts comprise a very small percentage (less than 1%).

Anyway, below are some statistics from 2003 in an article that appeared in The Japan Times on July 23, 2004:

"A record 34,427 people committed suicide in Japan last year. (2003)

The figure, up 7.1 percent from the previous year, remained above 30,000 for the sixth consecutive year, the National Police Agency said in a report released Thursday.

The report says 8,897 people killed themselves over financial difficulties, up 12.1 percent from a year earlier and topping 8,000 for the first time since the NPA began keeping statistics on suicides in 1978.

Suicides motivated by financial difficulties accounted for a quarter of all suicides in the year, comprising the second-largest group, compared with 11.2 percent in 1994.

Almost 60 percent of the suicides in 2003 were by people in their 50s and older, it said.

Health reasons were the motivation for the largest number of suicides in 2003, prompting 15,416, or 44.8 percent of the total, to take their lives. Some 8.5 percent committed suicide due to family problems.

Men accounted for a record 72.5 percent of all suicides in 2003, contributing to the wider gap -- 6.97 years -- between the average life expectancies of men and women, as released earlier this month by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry."

it is mostly that the problems are supressed or ignored until it becomes very dangerous. If you look in the media there, there is alot of disturbing stuff that doesn't seem to reflect daily life at all, until it shows up in the news. I saw a post on/. recently about American neoslaves working themselves to death while Europeans enjoyed vacations twice as longs as ours, but what about the three months of rioting in France about the lack of jobs for the youth? Despite the incredible flamewars during the 2000

After living here for about 6-7 years, and working in a Japanese office environment, suicide is the result of the non-violent way that the Japanese have dealt with getting rid of people you don't like.

The Japanese are no longer a violent race of people after the war, having said that, they are no less at peace with themselves or with others. Since they refuse to use violence, they have had to use other ways of controlling others - and the result is that the Japanese have evolved into a race of people who have learnt to push people's emotional buttons to defend themselves and get what they want.

The fact is, if you can mentally make a person turn on THEMSELVES - then you don't have to kill them. You feed them guilt, you over work them, you deprive them of sleep, you bully them, you ignore them, you socially ostracize them... all the while faking a smile at them and telling them that you like them.

OK, so someone gets angry and tries to use violence.... socially ostracized, arrested, lose your job, nobody will employ you, have a nice homeless life.

This is what the younger generation has been fighting against by refusing full term employment. This is why you have a nation of recluses. This is why some people are bumping themselves off.

Wow . . . that's an awfully derogatory way to describe cultural differences. Yes, the Japanese dislike physical violence; yes, they can be clever at manipulating others' emotions; and yes, there may even be a cause-and-effect relationship between those two traits. But implying that they use that method to "get what they want" or "defend themselves" in the same way as Westerners do shows a basic misunderstanding of Japanese culture.

Japanese, on the whole, place significant value on helping others rather t

Man#1: Aye, in them days we was glad to have the price of a cup of tea!

Man#2: Aye, a cup of cold tea!

Man#4: Without milk or sugar!

Man#3: Or tea!

Man#1: Aye, in a cracked cup and all!

Man#4: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a
rolled-up newspaper!

Man#2: Aye, the best we could manage in those days was to suck on a piece
of damp cloth!

Man#3: Aye, but we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

Man#1: Because we were poor! My old dad used to say to me: Money
doesn't buy you happiness!

Man#4: Aye, he was right, I was happier then and I had nothing. We
used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the
roof.

Man#2: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We had to all live
in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, half the floor
was missing, and were all huddled together in a corner for
fear of falling!

Man#3: You were lucky to have a room! We used to 'ave to live in a corridor!

Man#1: Oh, we used to DREAM of living in a corridor. It would have
been a palace to us. We used to have to live in an old
water tank in a rubbish pit. We got woke up every morning
by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us!
House! Huh!

Man#4: Well, when I say house, it was only a hole in the ground
covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us!

Man#2: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and
live in a lake!

Man#3: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty
of us, living in a shoebox in the middle of the road!

Man#1: Cardboard box?

Man#3: Aye!

Man#1: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in
a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the
morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread,
go to work down at the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week
out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home, our dad would
thrash us to sleep with his belt.

(slight pause)

Man#2: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock
in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of damp gravel,
work a twenty-hour

Certainly I think you raise a very good point, but there is a fundamental difference between east and west that nobody so far has touched upon, and it is important. We have a large stigma against suicide - in Japan that doesn't really exist, from what I understand. And there is a reason for that difference.

Put simply, Western spirituality is about how human beings relate to a divine being (God, Allah, etc.), but there is an assumption that human beings are not themselves divine. Eastern spirituality is about understanding how human beings are divine - they have part of the divine in them. So, ending your life in Western spirituality is a source of judgement and damnation at the hands of the divine, whereas ending your life in Eastern spirituality is in part setting the divine part of you free - hence, no ill spiritual aftereffects, and no stigma.

There's also a large number of suicides that are attempts at auto-erotic asphyxia gone wrong, from what I've heard - they get classified as a suicide because "suicide" is a lot less embarassing than the truth.

That is because there is a distinct difference between wanting to kill oneself and wanting the world to THINK you wanted to kill yourself, aka a call for help. The numbers are also skewed somewhat because many young girls attempt suicide on more than one occasion, whereas if you are successful that pretty much means it is your last attempt.

Many women kill themselves in violent "reliable" ways, they truly wanted to die, and of course many of the women who took a bunch of pills truly DID want to die, but most who slash their wrists in a very shallow way or who take pills are really making a call for help. They do not truly wish to die and so should be differentiated somewhat from actual suicide attempts that failed (such as botched gunshot wounds, many people attempt to shoot themselves without realizing the parts of their brains which are actually essential, that should most certainly be considered an actual attempt).

The majority of suicides in Japan are older men, peaking at 71.1 people per 100,000 for men in the 55-59 age range. This is not particularly surprising, considering the pressures on men of that age (higher chance of being made unemployed, older parents to look after, higher rate of divorce, lower chance of promotion, etc.).

Young girls don't even come close; the 15-19 year old female suicide rate is 5.6 per 100,000.

Concerns over youth suicide being a prevalent issue in Japanese culture have been around a lot longer than 2002 (the year that film was made). That's like saying the movie 8 Mile predicted a future full of rap music.